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At what level do you say you speak (2) ? | ||
Tags: CEFR Language Levels | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 113 of 118 03 April 2013 at 8:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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This is the English forum. Please provide a translation for anyone unable to speak
Spanish. This is forum etiquette. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4263 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 114 of 118 03 April 2013 at 9:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Alright, this is the last time I'll respond to you.
1. I DID mean 3 times the number of hours versus X hours. 2. Yes, there are a lot of variables but in the example I put, the two students had same affinity for languages and were at the same level. One can be slightly more efficient but in the example I put the person that was abroad for 3 years was 100% immersed and had a relationship completely in the foreign language. The "Benny" method consists in talking to a lot of people without traditional classroom study. If somebody is chatting up natives and also reads and does grammar, how is his method worse? There are no shortcuts, you gotta put in the time, whether it is "input" or "output", you have to put in the work. 3. I don't recall his name (Dutch super polyglot) but even he, a very accomplished polyglot says that you can learn a bunch of words in an hour but you will forget almost all of them. You have to do a lot of repetition to do it. And yes, I do know what it takes to memorize and process a lot of information. My career is most-likely the most memory-intensive profession in the world. 4. I have read much of his blog. Regardless of a disclaimer, it is very misleading, to me and to a lot of people. 5. What is "Tu quoque, Brute". You violated the English language rule first. 6. Good luck in your language learning. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 115 of 118 03 April 2013 at 9:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Benny also reads and studies grammar. It's just relegated to stage 2 or 3 of his studies, when he's already got a context to use it in. Benny even likes reading grammar books once he has this context because it allows him to think "so that's why they say that!". Nobody said to not put in the work. It matters how you do it though and if you'll read a few logs here you will see some amazing achievements in... a couple months, on one or two hours a day. Benny will not tell you anything different? No two people are the same, no two situations are the same. Your example doesn't mean much if you don't elaborate on how exactly you intend to measure results. So please, elaborate exactly, in detail, what situations you are comparing. It is unclear to me what you are actually trying to say.
Who is this super polyglot, why should I believe him, and my career is very memory- intensive too. Evidence to source these statements, please? And yes, you need repetition. But repetition doesn't need to last for more than a few days or weeks before it's imprinted for good. Good, concerted practice leads to results that you will notice in the space of a few months. If you're not making progress, rethink your approach. Nothing out of the ordinary here and also nothing far from what anyone has written here, nor polyglots on their blogs (Benny is very explicit about thi even...)
This sentence makes no sense. What is misleading, what disclaimer are you talking about (I was under the impression the no promises approach was reiterated, oh, every blog post) and what exactly is Benny saying that you feel is illegitimate? Please state exactly where he misleads you and to what extent. If it's true I am sure we can point it out to Benny and make him see where his error is?
As long as I provide an elaboration or a translation in English afterwards (which I did) there is nothing wrong. Furthermore, it's a Latin quote from a very famous scene (Caesar being killed during the Ides of March). Your ignorance of this quote notwithstanding, it's a common cultural reference and you can be expected to know what it means. Many people that have not studied Latin know this quote. It implies an attack on someone's hypocrisy, trying to find fault in them personally when there is no relevance to the actual argument what they think or not.
Thank you, and a good morning to you too. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 116 of 118 03 April 2013 at 10:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I'm getting slightly tired of the battle between Casamata and Tarvos, so to both of you: please stop arguing now before it becomes necessary to close the thread.
This is a relevant observation, and it is also relevant for the interpretation of the research on those music students. You won't be let into a music conservatory without a rigorous test, so anybody there should already be fairly musical. Could it be that eliminating the dunces leaves such a homogenous group that the amount of hard work is enough to predict who becomes an international soloist and who has to accept a life as a mediocre run-of-the-mill music teacher? Supplementary question: could it be that those who are really talented (!) get so much more satisfaction and progress out of their their exercises that they become motivated to spend even more time on doing them? One more factor to consider. To learn languages you need to absorb a tremendous lot of trivial data. A physicist or mathematician may have fewer things to learn, but some of these are extremely challenging and demand a high intelligence in the classical sense. Could it be that true genius tends to get buried under the learning of trivialities in language learning - at least until you at long last have mastered the basics and can start your journey towards the stars? Edited by Iversen on 03 April 2013 at 11:19am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 117 of 118 03 April 2013 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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In case anyone is interested in the issue of practice on skill acquisition, here are some freely available pdfs of papers by the original researchers of the Berlin Music study:
First from 1994 around the time of the original study: http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/course/6/6.055/readi ngs/ericsson-charness-am-psychologist.pdf And a recent review chapter from 2006: http://www.skillteam.se/wp-content/uploads/2 011/12/Ericsson_delib_pract.pdf And a more accessible one from the Harvard Business Review: http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/everything/er icsson2007a.pdf One reason why innate talent may be less important than practice, could simply be because all this practice is essentially rewiring relevant parts of cortex (whether this is to learn chess or speak a language, or swing a bat just right), and this sort of precise rewiring/growth of cortical tissue takes a long time (literally 1000s of hours) with a very precise sort of staggered and structured input to the areas you want to grow. And while people may differ in terms of intelligence and personality, neurons from one person to another are identical, and so growth and rewiring are constrained in very similar ways across people. If so, it doesn't really matter where you start out at (=talent), what matters is the new part of the brain you end up growing/developing (=practice). I have no idea whether this hypothesis is true, but certainly in say piano players brain imaging shows relevant areas associated with specific fingers growing bigger in the brain as people learn, likewise areas of the brain associated with spatial awareness have been shown to become enlarged as London taxi drivers learn the Knowledge (where they must not only memorize every street in London, but also the shortest ways between every street, in order to become qualified). One core idea is that comes out of this literature is that practicing is not enough, but what is needed is 'deliberate practice', which involves identifying your weaknesses and then constantly putting yourself outside your comfort zone daily to practice what you are not good at in order to improve. Apparently this sort of deliberate practice (as reported by experts) is unpleasant and tiring and can only be done for a few hours a day. I would love to know what this distinction between 'practice' vs 'deliberate practice' would imply for language learning. Edited by patrickwilken on 03 April 2013 at 4:56pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6152 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 118 of 118 03 April 2013 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
This is a very interesting concept and one I feel very applicable to my own language study. In the past, I could do a large amount of study using a variety of methods that weren't that taxing. My previous techniques included FSI drills, wordlists, passive wave Assimil and other heavily input based methods. However, my more recent experience is that techniques that require a much bigger effort have much bigger rewards. This newer approach involves listening, comprehension, grammar and vocabulary based exercises. I've also adapted a more functional approach to my learning, focusing on particular areas of weakness. I generally identify these through exercises or asking for honest feedback from native speakers. It's not a comfortable feeling actively exploring your weak areas, but it is worth it. It's also not easy, and I'm hard pushed to do more than for or five hours study in any given day. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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